Windows 7: When is enough enough?

I seem to be having a problem. I am performance hungry. I bought my dream laptop complete with windows 7, 6 gb, of ram, 500gb hdd, and i7 processor. This baby runs smooth, i have no complaints at all. But i am always tweaking it, always looking for new ways to increase boot time increase performance, my processors arn't even pushed to the max when i am rendering videos, it have never gone over 50% ram usage. I guess what I'm asking is that is this normal? I like to build and repair pc's im not exactly a guru maybe just a fan boy. Do you guys enjoy taking everything possible out of your pc's? Do you guys constantly look at how new technology could boost your performance? or should i be happy with what i have and worry about other things? Also any suggestion on increasing boottime? its around 40 -60 seconds everytime I boot it up my friend has his down 30 but he runs just the necessairy items i like to have my dell dock pop up keeps my desktop clean.

Well you have two choices to get a better boot time. SSD or a Hybrid Drive.

Uncheck everything but AV and gadgets/stikynotes in msconfig>Startup as others are freeloaders on RAM/CPU, Startup Time and can spy on you.

Check Performance log to see what stalls startup or shutdown, if anything. Click through WEI score at Comptuer>Properties to Advanced Tools. Look for cued issues at top of page, Performance log, and Generate a System Health Report.

Run a lightweight (free) AV like MS Security Essentials or Avast 5. This helps performance greatly.

Enable a Boot Log in msconfig>Boot log. Afterwards, the boot log will be found in \Windows\ntbtlog.txt

You might take a look at these forum articles.

Optimize Windows 7

Suggestions for Proper Maintenance

The one thing that had the most effect on speeding up my machine's boot time was disabling unneeded programs at startup.

I have to agree with Logicearth.

A ssd is the way to go if you want a real fast boot time.

Since fitting mine I can be on the desktop with everything loaded within 22 seconds of pressing the on button. It rocks!

Hi all
But in doing this surely you miss the leisurely trip down to the Coffee Machine and having a chat with your workmates while your old slow Dinosaur is booting up -- that's part of the daily ritual.

I suppose each to their own but if I were at home I wouldn't care too much about how long the machine took to boot up -- BUT IF IT COULD MAKE ME MONEY by giving me very fast response times on various Stock exchange Sites or Betfair etc then that WOULD interest me.

Not being a gamer and not needing Video streams around the house I don't actually see what I'd get out of having a NEWER faster computer.

EXCEL works quite fast enough for me and I have some pretty complex statistical graphing and analysis worksheets for Market analysis too.

However if you LIKE having the fastest gear then thats a hobby too so nothing wrong with that although what you would actually DO with it ?

Cheers
jimbo

Well shoot lol I tried saving money by not getting a ssd but it might be an option soon, I really didnt want to becuase i wanted as much storage as i could get on here so I took the 500 gbb hdd instead of a 80 gb ssd for my studio 17, i use it for all of my clases in college and I commute so it goes everywhere with me, it still starts up fast rocks both my friends laptops using performance test I about double their scores, its just my friends boots up faster but he doesnt run ne thing but his dell dock and one gadget. I run my dell dock and a couple gadgets and my start up programs are smart defrag and zune I also have malware bytes on. But all that dell data safe crap comes on and I have backed up mu computer weekly to be safe both on discs and online should I Take those off start up? other than that I was hoping for like a little fix in windows like how xp had so many things you could do to boot it up faster. And as of right now i dont have the money to go and buy a ssd or the guts to open up my brand new studio 17..... also what is a hybrid drive?



Also, as i layed in bed a burning question came to me. It has nothing to do with computers but still, I have a laser Kaleidoscope it is a red light I baught it from spencers if any one knows what that is anyways it takes a single laser and splits it all over the room and has about 25-30 red dots that are stationary while 80-100 red dots move around and then join into the stationary dots, my question is could this damage my 50 inch plasma tv if the tv is off? or even my laptop screen for that matter? I would hate to have any thing happen to my pride and joys.

Well there are different hybrid drives that came out, was suppose to be the major thing when Vista was released that never happened. But Seagate released a new one just a couple of months ago that should really help boost bootup performance and give you the space you want.

I bought one myself for my older laptop a few weeks ago. Seagate Momentus XT, 500 GB with 32 MB buffer. comes with an additional 4 GB of Flash for use as a read cahce of frequently used data. This can include boot files and applications and school assignments.

ST95005620AS Momentus® XT 3Gb/s 500GB Hard Drive | Seagate

I paid $140.71 (thats including tax and free shipping) from Newegg.

*LOL*
I think it depends on what you're doing with your computer. I'm doing 3D art and when I'm rendering and re-rendering a scene, experimenting with light and textures, for me it makes a big difference if the render takes 3 minutes or 30 seconds. So I guess I'm sort of performance hungry too
If you don't really use all that performance... well, then it's just a hobby without any goal or aim, and why not? It's harmless and doesn't hurt anybody, so enjoy

\

Hi and welcome


Think you mean decrease boot time, and there are many ways including not having start up items launch until late (auto delayed start)

Laptops should not usually be overclocked because of heat etc. I wouldnt worry about your cpu running @ 50 % and that is perfectly normal.

Good rig, go forth and have fun.


Ken J